Wind turbines for wind power generation are typically grouped into so-called windfarms or wind parks comprising from only a few wind turbines up to large numbers. Especially, large off-shore wind farms are projected comprising up to hundred wind turbines or more. Since during recent years regenerative wind energy production increased considerably, it is expected that the number of wind turbines in a wind farm will also increase.
Typically, wind farms have a centralized control unit that allows monitoring and control of the wind farm. Each of the wind turbines in a wind farm is connected to this centralized control via a windfarm local area network (LAN). Also, each of the turbines includes a number of devices like controllers, sensors or the like which are connected to the windfarm network. Typically, these devices are connected to a central switch of the wind turbine.
For the communication inside the windfarm LAN and also for communication with a host outside the windfarm, e.g. at a remote control center, typically the Internet Protocol standard (IP) is used. IP is a network layer protocol in the internet protocol suite and is an upper layer protocol that also provides globally unique addresses (e.g., MAC address for Ethernet) but two of these addresses will not necessarily be able to communicate to each other. IP adds a service on top of these data link layer protocols that provides the ability to uniquely identify with and communicate with any other device on the network.
Therefore, each device connected to the windfarm LAN requires an IP address for communication. In computer networking, an IP address (internet protocol address) is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP). Any participating network device—including switches, controllers, sensors—requires its own unique address.
In principle, there are two methods of assigning IP addresses to devices: dynamic and static. Dynamic IP addresses are assigned for a variable length of time. In order to use a dynamic IP address, a service such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is used to assign an address to the requesting network device. The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a client-server networking protocol providing a mechanism for allocation of IP addresses to client hosts. However, if DHCP is used for allocating IP addresses in a windfarm network the correlation between devices and wind turbines is lost. Therefore, it cannot be determined to which specific turbine a device belongs and, accordingly, also which devices belong to the same turbine. However, it is important to reliably and correctly identify a specific wind turbine in a wind park and its built-in components.
For this reason, currently the network settings in a windfarm network are done manually. In particular, the static IP addresses are manually assigned to the devices according to a predetermined static numbering scheme. This work consumes a large amount of time and may need even weeks to be finished for large windfarms. Also, the manual assignment process is error-prone. In particular, it may happen that the same IP address is assigned twice or that no IP address is assigned to a component of a wind turbine.